


The Haunted Ruins of Fort Spearhead

by Spudato



Series: Bunfeed Bunsolved AU [2]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Baby's First Horror Fic, Based On Buzzfeed Unsolved, Horror, Multi, Paranormal Investigators, queer writing by a queer writer for queer readers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:26:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22869343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spudato/pseuds/Spudato
Summary: After her most successful video discovering the "mystery" of Dacite church, Velvet has a new girlfriend, new stakes, and a new place to scope out for her ghost-hunting series: Fort Spearhead. The mystery surrounding the ruins is one that Cinder's fascinated by on a personal level, but the trio may just be cause for the truth to finally reveal itself, over four hundred years after it was buried.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Cinder Fall, Blake Belladonna/Cinder Fall/Velvet Scarlatina, Blake Belladonna/Velvet Scarlatina, Velvet Scarlatina/Cinder Fall
Series: Bunfeed Bunsolved AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643929
Comments: 9
Kudos: 22





	The Haunted Ruins of Fort Spearhead

**Author's Note:**

> It's the silly shitpost fic, **Scary Edition (tm)**. No, I'm not joking, I _really_ tried on this one, y'all. I've never written horror before (or any sort of thriller-type thing, or anything that isn't dumb and gay), but [Tex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Texan_Red_Rose/pseuds/Texan_Red_Rose) decided to challenge themself to [write one](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22452910/chapters/53647786), and I figured... hey, I should give it a shot too! I'm sure it's not THAT hard! ~~it was very hard~~
> 
> So, thanks to Tex for inspiring me to write this, and thanks to the entirety of [Offal Hunt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16802197/chapters/39437548) for being my reference material on How To Write Good. Also, read Offal Hunt. (You may also want to read a lot of my other fic too, because all of the lore in this fic is _obscure_ and is basically a pop-quiz of my AUs. Think fast.)
> 
> [Velvet's pronouns are she/they, Cinder's pronouns are she/her, Blake's pronouns are they/them. Velvet's dialogue is to the left, Cinder's in the centre, Blake's to the right. Yes, I realised this format gets confusing with three characters but I'm committing to the bit.]

“So _heeeeeeeeello_ everybody! It has been _quite_ the while since we last did one of these, uh, little ghost hunt things that I seem to be making a series out of, but trust me, it’ll have been worth the wait ‘cause we have got a _doozy_ for you today!”

“We _maybe_ have a doozy.”

“We _possibly_ have a doozy for you. I mean, hah, it better be, because for those of you most eagerly awaiting the next instalment of _getting a girlfriend the ghost hunter way—”_

“Wait, is _that_ the name of the series?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Yeah it i— why _not?”_

“‘Cause, like, that implies _we_ started dating _because_ of a ghost hunt, which isn’t the fuckin’ case _at_ all—”

“Yeah, but, like, one in two is a fifty-fifty split, right? In any other context that’s, like, a _huge_ quantity of ghost in this relationship—”

“But I’m not a ghost? You thought I was a _demon.”_

“I mean, it’s still basically the same differ— okay, we’re not discussing this on camera.”

“Yeah, but I’m still right. Anyway, if you haven’t yet clued in, dear viewer, for this episode of… whatever we’re gonna call this show, we’ve got a _special guest_ coming along with us!”

“Ooh, I’ve never been a _special guest_ before.”

“I mean, I was either gonna say _special guest_ or _my ghostly goat gee-eff,_ formally known as Cinder ‘Triple-G’ Fall—”

“Yeah, no, hard pass.”

“Valid.”

“Okay, look. we’re getting off-track— Cinder’s here! And if you didn’t tune in to the last video and therefore have, like, _no idea_ who this chick with the big goat horns is… how? I mean, _how?_ Seriously, that video is literally my most-watched upload of all time for some weird reason—”

“It’s ‘cause I have a face for the camera, obviously.”

 _“Obviously,_ baby. But still, y’all should definitely go back and give that video a watch first, ‘cause it really clears up how me an’ Blake obtained a new girlfriend—”

“It’s the one entitled _‘I Got A Ghost Girlfriend?!’,_ open-square-parentheses _‘Not Clickbait’_ close-square-parenthese, to be specific. All-caps.”

“It was a _little_ on the nose.”

“Yeah, but, like, which bit of it is wrong? Which part? Point to it.”

“Last I checked—”

“Point to it, Cinder.”

 _“Last I checked,_ I was a demon, not a ghost!” _[laughter]_ “Also, I’m still alive. Externally, at least.”

“Wow, now that’s a mood.”

“Look, look; ghosts, demons, spirits— _whatever._ I said what I said, and I stand by it. Anyway, both of you shut it for a sec whilst I intro.”

_[laughter]_

“So, yeah, Cinder here decided to commandeer her first episode by finding us a spot to explore that looks _pretty_ fuckin’ fascinating, and this time, we figured, y’know, why not go all in? So we’re going to the ruins of Fort Spearhead on Vale’s southern coastline, and we’re gonna be staying the _night.”_

“To be absolutely clear, that bit was Velvet’s idea, not mine.”

“She won’t let us talk her out of it.”

“C’mon, we’re gonna go all in, babes! This one’s for all the marbles! We’ve got us a tent and some sleeping bags and some torches and we’re probably gonna start a campfire that rages outta control and we’re gonna sit there until some ghosts ask us to leave in _person!”_

“Or security guards, whichever gets there first.”

“Ah, fuck security, man, we can outrun ‘em. But yeah— we’re gonna go and drive down there now and set up shop, and we’ll be seeing y’all on the flipside.”

“Why do you two do this again?”

“Eh, I dunno. Velvet thinks it’s fun and I like watching her absolutely crap her pa—”

* * *

Cinder’s wanted to go and see and the ruins of Fort Spearhead for… well, years now, really.

Part of it is due to her own personal fascination with Faunus history as a whole — hence her painstakingly restoring the church she now calls home rather than demolishing it like the health hazard it’d been — because even though Vale isn’t the ancestral home of her bloodline in particular, it’s still full to bursting with artefacts and remains and carries a shroud of mystery that can’t be found quite as richly anywhere else. All the other kingdoms have either allowed the evidence of the old Faunus tribes to fall apart, or have taken steps to all but obliterate it themselves, but Vale has it laid bare if you know where to look, like dirt caught in the cracks of a facade, soil trapped under the nails.

The fort’s only made all the _more_ interesting, however, when Cinder asks Velvet where her family hails from, because even though Velvet’s a Menagerie native through and through…

“Shit, wait. Your family were the Chieftains of _Jarro?”_

… her blood is especially potent here.

Velvet nods, sat in the front passenger seat as Cinder drives them along the coastline, the sun beginning to dip downwards towards the horizon for an early sunset. It’s the midst of spring now, nearly six months having passed since the _incident_ at Cinder’s house and nearly four since they all decided to do something as brazen as _date,_ but there’s still a bite to the air that nips at the skin, promising that unless they find a way to keep warm, their camping tonight will be fucking fraught with shivers.

“Yeah, I heard we were the Chieftains for… I dunno, nearly a thousand years or something? Not sure how much of that is, like, true, but…” Velvet trails off, and she glances up from the camera on her lap to stare blankly out of the windshield instead, Cinder almost able to hear the gears turning in her head. “This place _is_ my homeland, you know? Which makes it all the more fuckin’ annoying that I have to fight the wheels of _bureacracy_ just for a stupid visa.”

Cinder blinks. Blinks again. “Shit. That’s wild.”

From the backseat, Blake leans forward; they’ve plonked themself into the middle seat even though it’s easily the most awkward and uncomfortable place to sit, but they don’t like not being able to see where the road goes, nor having to holler from the back just to get heard over the low hum of the radio. “And this fort is… it’s tribelands-era old, right?”

Technically speaking (if one wanted to be especially pedantic about the whole thing), it’s a little younger than that, built to consolidate the new boundaries of a burgeoning kingdom once what little remained of Jarro had been razed to the ground, native Faunus chased out by the blood-soaked tips of sword and spear. Then again, if Cinder wants to get even _more_ pedantic than _that,_ it was said that the foundations had already been built in the last few years of the war, when Jarro had created one last alliance that changed the tribe’s very name to _Jarrni,_ promising a final stand, a final battle, a final spluttering of a long-burnt candle before it died and left the Faunus abandoned in the darkness. To the very last, they did not go quietly.

Point being, Cinder doesn’t bother correcting them when they’re kind of mostly right. “Yeah, thereabout. It’s had my interest for quite a while now, since it’s not too far from my home and all, but I’d never really had good reason to go poking around. Too busy to be able to validate wandering off into a derelict old ruin.”

Velvet’s face — sort of set in sadness, like she’s remembering something from another lifetime — perks up at that, grinning toothily as the sunlight catches on honey-brown eyes, and Cinder very nearly veers them all off the road to an early death because she’s far too busy staring at how pretty Velvet is. “Sounds like it was great timing for you to crash into two idiots who do it for fun, then, huh?”

Cinder laughs, trying to pull her attention back onto where she’s driving rather than think about how gorgeous her girlfriend is, and the road ahead begins to curve off to the right as it follows the arc of the bay, high-tide leaving picturesque beaches flooded as the sunlight bounces off the glassy surface of the sea in golden beams. If Cinder squints through the windshield, however, and focuses very carefully on the farthest peak of the bay, she can just about make out their destination; stood above sheer, crumbling cliffs is a little hilltop surrounded by foliage, the thrash of stormy waters slowly dragging more and more precarious land under the surface, subject to the ever-churning battering of time.

Maybe she’s imagining it, but if she stares hard enough, she swears she can almost see the top of the fort.

* * *

“So… this is it, huh?”

“I mean, this _will_ be it, once we’re safely over the fence surrounding this whole thing. No need to sound so disappointed.”

“I’m not, I’m just— thought it’d be, like, more _impressive,_ in my mind—”

“We’re literally by the outskirts! Velvet! Give it a chance!”

“Alright, alright, I’m givin’ it a chance, I’m doin’ it.”

“Honestly, I—”

“You had b— oh, sorry. Go on, Blake.”

“Nah, s’alri— I was just gonna say, uh, I’m surprised they bothered putting a fence up here. We’re out in the middle of nowhere, and if someone went and got crushed to death or something, it’s not like anyone can blame the, uh- the council, or whatever.”

“Eh, you could. This is council land, and that makes this a council-owned structure, which makes it _their_ legal responsibility if they don’t make it clear you could die in it.”

“Then, like, stick a sign up and let me make my _own_ bad decisions—”

 _“Moving on._ Seriously, talking health and safety does not an engaging video make, so how about we spice it up a little?”

“Oh?”

“Let’s do a, um, a little voiceover! Give our viewers some context, yeah?”

“You, or Blake?”

“I mean, _you_ brought this idea to the table, Cinder, _you_ should get to do the dumb voiceovers.”

“Me? I said I have a _face_ for the camera, not a _voice—”_

“Well, hey, maybe they’re both lacking—”

“Asshole!” _[laughter]_

“For fuck’s sake— c’mon, Cinder, it’s sexy voiceover time! You’ll sound great doing it, baby, trust me; tell us what we’ve got here!”

“Yeah, but should I have— like a script, or something? This is going to be a terrible voiceover if I’m doing it off-the-cuff—”

“Nah, nah, baby, it’s cool. We’ll do a few takes if you think it really sucks, if you want. ‘Sides, it’s not like any of this is _professional.”_

“I think anyone can tell you that.”

“Shut the heck your mouth. Anyway, go for it! Give us your best shot.”

 _[sigh]_ “Okay, okay, if you insist. I guess.... I guess we should, uh, start with—”

* * *

The war against the Faunus tribes of Remnant — known better as the _War of the Monarchs,_ or as the _Tyrant’s Massacre,_ or, more simply, _The Three-Hundred Years War_ — came to a close near, and after, the end of the 290s. With most of the tribes destroyed and the four human kingdoms growing ever larger in light of successive victories, new defences were built to consolidate and fortify the lands they’d claimed, and one such creation was built to commemorate what was, to the humans, the end of a long and bloody campaign to eradicate the Faunus savages who lived upon their _rightful land._ Fort Spearhead — named for the metal-tipped tower that gleamed in the morning sunlight — was designed to be the tallest of all the forts in Vale, and was able to be seen right across the remnants of the then-Jarrnic tribelands as a show of encroaching victory. Once finished at the end of the war in 301, it became a boundary signifier between the newly-renamed city of Vale and the wider lands and farms of the kingdom, and became used more primarily as a watchtower from which any mammoth Grimm that tried to rise from choppy seas could be spotted, warnings raised and defences mustered before they could attempt to attack Vale’s wide and cliff-strewn coastline.

However, sometime in the early 600s, the violent history of the tower came to an even moreso violent end; deep into the darkest reaches of a lightless night, the tower was set ablaze in an inferno so bright and hot that the glow of it could be seen from the very farthest reaches of Vale, the soldiers inside trapped within and burning to death in minutes as the fort became utterly engulfed, and by the time the flames had petered out — nearly three days later — the top of the tower for which the fort had been so proudly named had toppled over, collapsing down the cliffs and tumbling into the tides below.

Reasons as to why, exactly, the tower had gone up in flames vary, and despite an official investigation instigated by the monarchy at the time, no conclusive explanation has ever been reached. Arson was — and is — considered the simplest and easiest answer to reach for, since stories of hooligan Faunus attempting to set alight the temples to human victory were not uncommon to hear of at the time, but others still claim the possibility of a freak accident. Perhaps it was struck by lightning, they say, though witness testimony states that there was no storm on that dry and peaceful summer night, and no evidence as to whether it was powered by the arcane forces of Dust. A third theory claims conspiracy; that within the tower was blooming a movement of disgruntled soldiers who planned to overthrow the monarchy, given that they were Mantle sympathisers who wanted Vale to join the Mantle-Mistral alliance, and that when their plans had been discovered, a riot had broken out and a fire started to trap the traitors inside.

But it’s the fourth theory, however, that was the one to capture Cinder’s attention to thoroughly, that made her suggest the fort to Blake and Velvet in the first place; that the fire had not been caused by _living_ hands, but by the furious spirits of the Hallows, the ghosts of countless Faunus murdered on the land the fort stood atop rising from the grave to summon unnatural ends in a final, blazing reminder of their never-ceasing rage.

* * *

“Wait, so… you heard that maybe some angry ghosts committed _ghost arson_ and went ‘heck yeah, sign me the fuck up’?”

“I mean, why wouldn’t I? The Hallows are such a cornerstone of ancient Faunus culture — of _our_ ancient culture — and, like, anywhere they’ve maybe trod is worth looking at, in my opinion.”

“That why you chose to live in a church dedicated to one of ‘em?”

“Well, technically, I didn’t know it was there until I was looking to buy the land, but hey. It’s interacting with and restoring history, _and_ now my house slaps at the same time! Everyone’s a winner!”

“Yeah, well, can’t say I don’t agree with you. About the Hallows, I mean, ‘cause, you know, figure they deserved the chance to set this massive… overcompensating stone _dick_ on fire—”

“Aaaaaand also because we’re all Faunus and so they might just leave us alone?”

“Wasn’t gonna say it but, yeah, that too.”

“Well, whatever. My point is, this place has a ton of theories going around that people are still debating over today, ranging from reasonable to outright _weird,_ and when a place is _this_ shrouded in mystery and shit, I wanna see how it all plays out. So, are we jumping this fence or not?”

“Oh, we’re _jumping.”_

“Or we could find a, y’know, normal person way of getting in first—”

“Wow. World’s _most boring_ ghost hunters.”

“Hey, you can go shredding your very nice pants and get lockjaw all you like, but I’m going to use my one intact braincell instead. ‘Sides, we’re running out of daylight and I am _not_ settin’ these tents up in the dark.”

“Yeah, but that means we _should_ jump on account of it being _quicker.”_

 _“No,_ we sh— okay, whatever, you two go and jump the fence whilst I and my working brain over here find another way around. Remember to record it all going wrong so I can laugh at it when you’re both in hospital.”

“I love how much you trust us and our wellbeing, baby.”

“Eat shit.”

* * *

It ends up that nobody has to jump the fence — so no pants get shredded nor tetanus contracted — because the reality is that the fence that rings the ruins is a shitty little construction-yard type deal that’s mostly collapsed into tangles of wires and plastic, Blake looking particularly smug when they trample right over a sign reading ‘NO TRESPASSERS’. As to whether it was destroyed by weather or destructive hands, Cinder isn’t too sure, but then again, Cinder also doesn’t really care.

Either way, all three of them end up tromping towards the fort as a little group with very little to obstruct their way, the barest hint of a cobbled path now layered in a carpet of greenery guiding their way faithfully inside, and as the daylight begins to dim with every second as the sun settles down behind the thick copse of trees that circle the hill, it becomes easy to see why security isn’t really the highest priority around here. There’s hardly anything left standing around the remains of the central tower of the fort, and from what Cinder can vaguely remember of an old map showing the layout of the area during its prime, what were once barracks and training yards and stables are now little more than piles of toppled, mottled stone and mortar. In fact, the biggest danger they manage to encounter is a mess of thorns and briar that snag around unwary ankles like manacles and chains, Velvet laughing about how nostalgic it is even as Cinder swears all the while.

But the thicket isn’t the only thing that’s grown wildly out of control here; weeds grow in colourful arrangements beside moss-coated stone as flowers climb skywards in a crisscross of stems, and tree boughs hang heavy and sombre overhead, bowed over so that recent rainfall trickles from broad and glossy leaves in muted drips and drabs, and when one manages to strike Velvet right down the back of her shirt, she yelps loudly enough to echo for miles around.

“Fuck me!” Blake shouts with a jump, swatting the rounded bicep of one tanned arm as Velvet tries to shake the cold out. “You do this every time! Quit scaring everyone like that!”

“Sorry!” Velvet whispers back, though it’s less apologetic than panicked, her free hand reaching up her back to try and find the damp spot. Cinder, however, just sighs, trudging on ahead. They’d been about this loud when they’d both come stumbling onto her property, able to see them coming for ages given the way they’d been hollering and waving their torches around like they were trying to land an airship, desperately trying to hide from her in the bushes like a pair of idiots. It’s charming in its own way, she’ll admit, but it’s nowhere near dark enough to validate all the scares yet.

Still, she doesn’t get particularly far ahead of her partners when she stops to wait for them both to catch up anyway, because once she’s all but a few yards from the tower and the single surviving building that’s attached to the base, Cinder very quickly reaches the conclusion that there’s no fucking way she’s going to try and get in there alone. The whole thing looks like a deathtrap just waiting to be unleashed; the ruin of the upper tower is coated in vines and ivy that tangle around crumbling stone in a vast web that grip tight and squeeze, choking the final gasps of life out of a slender throat, whilst blackened brick has been left jagged as broken teeth and threatening to disintegrate at the slightest touch, teetering on the barest edge of existence. There’s no scaffolding around, no supports to help hold the carcass together; soon, it’ll be left nothing but a pile of unidentifiable rock, like a half-buried skeleton.

“Wow,” she hears Velvet breathe, and when she looks over one shoulder Velvet is stood not a pace behind, the taller girl angling her camera upwards at the very peak as she captures the way nature reclaims the intruders with a vengeance, how the plants slowly tear apart the structure from the inside out over hundreds of years left untamed. “You can barely tell there’s even a tower under there, huh? Could almost mistake it as being a tree trunk or something.”

A padding of feet from Cinder’s left, and Blake steps up to her side with a hum. “Yeah. I mean, I heard that sometimes people would come here to see the tower, and then leave because they thought there wasn’t actually anything left.” They look down to a chunk of brick at the toe of their shoe, and they roll it over idly, bugs squirming out from underneath. “I guess I would too, if all I thought there was here was a bunch of old stone.”

At that Cinder rolls her eyes, and she lifts a hand to brush some hair from her face, to toy with the shallow grooves in the base of her left horn. “Please, both of you need some patience for these things. There’s always more than what meets the eyes, you know.”

Reaching behind Cinder, Velvet nudges Blake’s shoulder with a wink and a smile, and then she casts her gaze about the area, taking in the mounds of ruins, the rampant plantlife, the shadows that grow darker between the trees. “That’s true, I guess, but do we think we can actually get into this place? Or do you think it’s all gone to shit after a few hundred years of ruin?”

Cinder’s about to point out an indent in the side of the building that looks suspiciously door-shaped — even if the tall weeds that have settled in front of it are doing their very best to obscure it entirely, thick enough to probably need the help of a pen-knife to cut down — when there’s a dull _thud_ from behind, and both she and Velvet glance backwards to see Blake tossing down their tent and sleeping bags onto the grass with a grimace.

“First things first,” they say, entirely unenthused, and Velvet winces before she laughs again, shutting off the camera and slipping an arm about Cinder’s waist before strolling them both over to help pitch camp.

* * *

“Okay, we’ve pitched our tents—”

“Which was honestly, like, the single biggest pain in my ass that we’ve _ever_ done for a video—”

“Awh, babe, even more than dating me?”

“Yeah, you’ve finally been topped.”

“Wait, people can top Velvet?”

“I can’t be topp— hah! Oh my _gods!_ I was gonna— same joke!”

“Same joke!”

“I hate it. I’m leaving.”

“Okay, okay, anyway. We’ve pitched our tent ready for our little night-shift, but for now, we’re gonna try and break into this fort for real—”

“Well, thanks for volunteering—”

“Oh, c’mon, babe, look at those _arms_ of yours! You’re not gonna make a cutie like me have to bust down that door all by myself, right?”

“This was _your_ idea— well, it was Cinder’s, actually, make Cinder do it—”

“You are, like, _six feet tall—”_

“What, and that makes me more qualified?”

“You were just telling me the other day how good you are at breaking and ent—”

“Not on camera! Oh, sweet maidens, baby, not on camera.”

“Oh, whoops. Sorry.”

“Okay, fine, whatever. Step back a second.” _[grunts]_

“Woo! You _go_ baby! Look at those arms _flexin’!”_

“Honestly, I don’t think it’ll hold for long.”

“Hang on, hang on… I can feel it giving, lemme just—”

“I think you got it—”

“I—”

_[thud]_

“Oh, _shit—”_

* * *

It’s only because Velvet’s faster at running than Blake is at falling that she catches them right before they disappear through the door — and Cinder really does mean _through,_ because it doesn’t _open,_ per se; rather, the wood’s mouldered and rotted into a decayed, flaking mess of splinters, and despite scratch marks showing that someone, once, had attempted to jimmy it open before, it only gives way by having a body crash against it. So, Blake’s clinging to Velvet’s hand with their feet scrabbling for traction on damp grass whilst their top half hangs inside a darkened interior, and Cinder has to hurry over to grasp at the back of their hoodie, dragging them back onto two feet and out of the danger of whatever lies within.

“Babe, you alright?!” Velvet asks, still gripping their hand for dear life. “Gods, you nearly ate _so_ much shit—”

“Didn’t, uh… didn’t think it’d just collapse like that,” they admit, breathless, gazing into the fort with wide eyes. “Other people musta found another way in or something, ‘cause there’s no way they used that door to leave.”

Stepping around the pair as Velvet fusses over Blake, Cinder ducks her head so that her tall horns don’t catch on the top of the flaking jamb, and she pokes her head inside for a very cursory peer at an interior that’s covered with dust and mildew. The smell of rot and undisturbed air makes her wrinkle her nose, and she thinks better of standing there too long before she steps back into the dying light outside.

“Good news is that it hasn’t all collapsed into rubble,” she starts, and then she grimaces. “Bad news is that it looks and smells about as abandoned as it is.”

This seems to have the desired effect on Blake — disgust — and the complete opposite on Velvet — awe — and the latter strides forward to take a glance inside too, all her concern for Blake melting away in favour of pointing her camera inside, tutting then it takes a few moments too long to adjust to the low light. “Well, it looks pretty untouched, at least. Couple of cigarette butts and bottles tossed in through the windows, but it looks like maybe nobody ever got inside this bit.” Velvet pauses. “Or they really did find another way in and out, but I’m not seein’ how.”

“Small blessings, at least,” Cinder says, an innate sarcasm making Blake grin. “Shall we get the torches out and have a proper look?”

That makes Blake’s grin melt back into their usual disagreeable demeanour, but Velvet’s already nodding away, bouncing on the balls of her feet like a little kid. For someone Cinder’s only known for maybe six months now, she has far too good an idea of what Velvet was like when she was ten. “Fuck yeah. We should put our respirators on, though, just in case.” She makes a face. “Who the heck knows what’s growing in there?”

“Bad omens,” Blake says, voice flat, and Cinder laughs.

* * *

“We are now, uh, inside the fort! Or, like, a bit of it—”

“Maybe some sort of kitchen area, or a mess hall type thing?”

“Yeah, yeah. The, uh, main tower bit is— _was_ over through this way right… _here,_ and there’s a doorway that would’ve, um, maybe led that way out—”

“Yeah, nah, that’s real blocked up. I’m not moving this whole beam thing across the door, whatever it is.”

“Looks like a bit of the ceiling.”

“Yeah, yeah, no, don’t touch that. I just— hm, other people _must’ve_ found another way in that didn’t involve, uh, flinging a six-foot cat at the problem, so maybe we should take a look around, see where they managed to get in?”

“How do we know that people ever _did_ get in?”

“Photos! There’s been a bunch taken inside the tower, so there must be a way, right?”

“Probably crawled through one of these tiny windows.”

“Ugh, don’t say that. My ass is never gonna fit through there.”

“Y— _your_ ass? Bitch, what about _my_ ass?”

 _[snaps fingers]_ “I love you both dearly, and you both have very nice asses, but there’s some stairs that go up over here.”

“Stair— didn’t we _just_ agree that part of the ceiling is now on the floor?”

“Better come up with me so that it doesn’t collapse on you, then, right?”

“Ooh, she has you there.”

“Mind if I ask why we’re dating, again?”

“Because Velvet’s hot and I make good tea! And also, like, make a lot of money.”

“Mama always warned me about being a gold-digger, and now I see why.”

“Eh, I’m more of a sugar mama. So, are we agreed?”

“Hell yeah!”

“Excellent! Let’s go.”

* * *

Blake’s concerns about the floor aren’t unwarranted, because once Cinder’s at the top of the stairs it becomes very clear that the roof’s seen far better days an awful long time ago, a huge hole in narrow rafters having left the floorboards vulnerable to the winds and the rains of yesteryear, every cautious step making it sag underfoot. Like much of the rest of the ruins, plants have burst to life inside, ferns gathered in bunches of narrow stripes of leaves and wedged into each corner of the room, water dripping steadily from countless leaks above, and algae has grown abundant and slippery in the crevices of the planks, dark and shiny with damp. Yet, other than the damage and the plants that now call this floor their home, there’s very little else to see. 

Cinder swings her torch about, gritting her teeth when the floor shifts and debris cracks under one steel-toed boot like a threat, but there’s only a few old chairs stacked up like a pyre, as well as a brass lamp discarded on the floor, left warped and distorted from extreme heat. There’s nearly no evidence of any wanderers up here, either — probably having thought better of it — but Cinder does note that above a cold and abandoned hearth, something has been carved into the wide wooden beam that sits atop the firebox, each letter sharply angled and cut deep from force. 

She doesn’t recognise the language, but the longer she stares, the more she begins to suspect she knows somebody who does.

“Hey, Velv?” Cinder calls, flashing the torchlight down the stairs, voice somewhat muffled by the respirator. “Can you read a thing for me?”

There’s a distinct little _ooh_ before feet follow after Cinder, heavy steps made soft as to not cause the stairs to collapse underfoot, and when Velvet presses up against Cinder — tall enough to prop her chin between curling horns, ill-advised as she is to do so — she’s quick to angle the camera towards the hearth, Cinder’s torch lighting it up for her to better read.

“Oh, that’s Jarran— well, geez, _duh,_ no surprise there.” She laughs to herself, one arm snaking about Cinder’s waist to squeeze her close, and she leans more weight onto Cinder’s narrow shoulders as she murmurs under her breath, uncertain syllables slipping free.

“Let’s see… it’s, uh, it’s something like…” she pauses, thinks about it. “Something like _they all got what they had coming to them,_ yeah? It’s like a little victory note.”

“Think a ghost wrote it?” Blake calls from downstairs, and Velvet laughs again, standing back up to slip away from Cinder’s horns and take the weight off her shoulders before Cinder’s knees (and the floorboards, subsequently) give out from under her.

“Nah, unless ghosts can use a pen-knife or something these days. Probably some kid feeling real pissed and ballsy, wanted to make a statement no matter the danger.” Velvet pauses. “Which, yeah, is like, me and every other Jarran kid I’ve ever known at any given moment, so.”

“Cute,” Cinder huffs around a smile, casting the light across the room again. The sunlight is now little more than a murky blue haze, the shadows growing darker every minute before they inevitably weave together to create the blanket of nightfall, and even Cinder’s eyes are starting to struggle to adjust to the beckoning of twilight, unsure where the exact edges of everything lie. Even with so little in the room, the corners of her eyes spot shifting, darkened figures that hover on the edge of her awareness, and when something below her creaks ominously, groaning with old wounds, it’s the first time all day that she — very nearly — flinches.

“Get back down here before something falls on you,” Blake calls again, their impatient stare able to be felt in every word, and Velvet acquiesces with a chuckle, making her way back downstairs in leggy, loping steps. As Cinder turns to follow, though, focusing her light towards the top of the stairs to ensure she doesn’t trip, there is — just for the smallest fraction of a second — the barest scent of something acrid, worming its way through the filters of the respirator to stick against the back of her throat with a bitter tang, as soft and fuzzy with familiarity as a memory.

A warmth runs up the length of Cinder’s spine in the same instant she manages to place the scent as _smoke,_ drifting past her like a ghost, but by the time she’s turned back around to try and spot the origin of both, it’s gone.

She is the only person in the room.

* * *

“So after _much_ fiddling about in the dark—”

“I— don’t word it like that.”

“—we’ve found a bunch of old stone, old rooms, old ruins, old rubble, and not a whole lot of old ghosts or arsonists or just about anything else.”

“No Hallows, either.”

“Yeah, none of that to be seen! And it’s gettin’ _real_ fuckin’ dark right about now, and it’s making us triapsing around the woods outside of Cinder’s house look like a real field trip, so here’s the deal; we’re gonna do one more lap of this place in the dark and see if any ghosts chat to us or make some fun and spooky noises, and if that fails, we’re gonna go to sleep and see what taps us on the asses first: angry ghosts, or Vale’s rare security detail.”

“I bet it’s security.”

“Wh— what _security?_ Which poor fucker has the midnight shift at the scary abandoned ruins? I would literally just quit at that point.”

“Maybe they all pull straws for it.”

“They cannot be spending money on this. They cannot.”

“Ah, it’s alright. We’ll make some scary oogy-woogy noises and that’ll scare ‘em off.”

_[laughter]_

“Just have ‘em be there, like, into their radio, goin’ ‘yeah nah I’m not paid enough for this shit, peace.’”

“Gods. Maybe one of us should wander around in the night, rustle some trees? Maybe sit in the fort and whisper about fire.”

“Great, yeah, give the camera some _false-positives._ We’re here to _find_ the oogy-woogy, not _be_ the oogy-woogy!”

“We can multitask!”

“Multita— oh, sweet maidens.”

_[laughter]_

“Just… just help me do another loop of this place so I don’t fall over my own two feet and die. We’ll do another sweep in the morning and then drive home, alright?”

“Sounds like a plan, baby.”

“Awright.”

* * *

The second sweep of the fort is in complete darkness. There’s not even any help to be found by the pale illumination of the moon, nor from the freckles of stars above or by the faded orange glow of the light pollution that stains the sky above Vale proper; it’s a new moon, and clouds gather over the speckled constellations until they’re all obscured and out of sight, too far from Vale for artificial lights to reach them and plunging them into a night so dense that even three pairs of Faunus eyes struggle to make head or tail of anything around them. Their torches cast flickering shadows that dance across ancient walls, forging uncertain shapes that trick the eye, and as they wander up and down the stairs and in and out of the fort, confidence wavers. Trying to enter into the remains of the tower had been hard enough in semi-daylight, but without a sense for where anything is, it’s made twice as hard in the night.

Around the third attempt to get into the tower through other means, Blake curses under their breath, and they poke their head out of one window, squinting upwards as they try and make out the vague silhouette of the beheaded tower in relation to where they’re all gathered inside.

“I just don’t fucking get it,” they hiss. “We’ve gone every which way around this fuckin’ thing, but there’s only one way in! There’s gotta be another way!”

“Maybe all those photographers went in before the ceiling collapsed,” Velvet muses aloud, frowning as she pushes at the heavy beam that lies across the corridor into the tower, half-crushing the doorframe under the sheer weight. “Kinda explains how so many got roasted alive, though, if this was the only way out.”

Blake ducks their head back inside, and Cinder’s torchlight makes their eyes flash an ethereal green, throwing back the light at uneven angles as it strikes the back of their retinas. “Maybe, I guess. Still, I just… damn, I really wanted to at least get some footage from inside the tower, since we lugged all our shit all the way out here.”

Their face sets into a disappointed frown, and Cinder coos, crossing the room to slip a hand behind Blake’s neck, black curls of hair tickling across her knuckles like tendrils of smoke. They’re tall enough that she has to tug them down quite a ways before she can press a kiss to their mouth, and she murmurs a consolation against their lips. “Aw, baby, it’s alright. We’re still having a good time, and I’m pretty sure ghosts aren’t confined to just the twenty-odd square metres they died in, right?”

Blake pouts, Cinder quickly kissing it away again, but they seem in higher spirits — comforted, conviction bolstered by her assurance — even as Velvet sighs and lowers her camera, reaching up to scrub the heel of her palm against one eye.

“Well, we should better hope _that’s_ true, ‘cause I’m exhausted from wandering around this place. Let’s hit the hay and see if anything gets caught on the cameras during the night, yeah?”

Blake nods, and Cinder slides a hand down their arm to link their fingers together before reaching over for Velvet’s, too, her girlfriend’s palm squeezing tight to her own. She has to really crane her neck back to look them both in the eyes — seriously, they’re both a good head-and-a-bit taller than she is — but their little smiles are tired and gentle and makes them both look so far from intimidating, all too eager to please, a pair of little flames that ignite in her heart. It’s nice.

“Good idea,” she says, lifting Velvet’s knuckles to up to her mouth, brushing her lips along scarred, scuffed skin. “C’mon, let’s settle down for the night.”

* * *

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[inaudible shuffling]_

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[inaudible muttering]_

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[voice, inaudible]_

_[silence]_

_[voice, inaudible]_

_[inaudible shuffling]_

_[voice, inaudible]_

“Mm… Cinder?”

_[silence]_

_[voice, inaudible]_

“Blake?”

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

“... ‘k. Whatever.”

_[inaudible shuffling]_

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[voice, inaudible]_

“Somebody awake?”

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

“Hello?”

_[silence]_

_[silence]_

_[voice, unknown origin:_ **help me** ** _._** _]_

* * *

Velvet doesn’t know that voice.

She jerks upright with fear shooting, cold and electric, right up her spine, and she reaches blindly for her torch as her legs kick against the confines of her sleeping bag, caught and cocooned with it twisted about her ankles sometime in the night. Her ears strain for the voice as she grapples for the switch on her torch, and by the time sweaty palms manage to finally turn it on — which takes three nerve-wracking attempts, each sudden flicker of light making her heart leap into the back of her throat with a sour acid tang as shadows and shapes leap off the canvas — there’s nothing left to be heard but her own breathless struggling.

Panning the torch about the tent, hands shaking, Velvet takes stock; by some miracle, Blake’s still asleep, muttering in the midst of a dream with their back to Velvet, but Cinder’s sleeping bag — set out between them, just the way she likes to sleep — is empty. There’s a residual warmth left behind when Velvet runs a hand over her pillow and down into the sleeping bag, but only barely, and when Velvet’s ears almost hum from the sheer weight of the heavy silence that’s now settled over her, she becomes very aware and very afraid that something has gone horribly wrong.

“Cinder?” she whispers, unzipping her sleeping bag so that she can untangle her legs, keeping her voice low as to not wake Blake up. How on Remnant Cinder had managed to wriggle her way out of the tent without waking either of them up is a mystery, given that she’d snuggled up so tightly to Velvet that she’d joked they should just share a sleeping bag to save on space. Only now, well, she’s starting to wish they had.

The tent is still shut tight, almost exactly the same way it’d been when they’d all tucked in for the night, and Velvet glances over to check that Blake is still asleep once more before she reaches over to open up the flap, drawing down the slider with a harsh hiss. The air that breezes in is cold enough to make Velvet’s hair stand on end despite the sweat that’s starting to gather on her temples, and she peers outside with her torch held in a vice-like grip, shining the light about the area with tension reeling ever tighter between her shoulder blades, taut enough to snap. She’s not sure what to expect — figures emerging from the treeline, eyes glinting from hidden corners — but as she looks around, her cursory glances reveal nothing of the sort; just trees, just debris, just a starless night sky overhead.

“Cinder? Babe? You out here?”

It’s deep into the witching hour now, the darkness that’s descended so dense that it feels like a physical shroud, has a texture Velvet can touch, and the woods feel too still, the grass dew-wet against her palm as she crawls further out of the tent. It’s so quiet it almost hurts to hear, the blood in her ears singing a low and bassy note, and when Blake suddenly groans in their sleep her whole body flinches with fear before she can quell it.

Still, Cinder is nowhere to be seen.

“Maidens preserve me,” Velvet mumbles before she half-squats to make her way out of the tent proper, and despite everyone whinging about it at the time, she’s really glad she’d left her battered shoes on just in case of an emergency — though she hadn’t imagined the emergency to be something like her girlfriend running off in the middle of the night for some godsforsaken reason. Blake whimpers, shifting around in their sleep, and Velvet reaches back inside to grab her camera, sat recording on a tripod in the corner of the tent for the executive purpose of capturing any spooky noises that might sound off in the night. Only now, after she’s got Cinder back in bed where she’s meant to be and the sun is up, she’ll be using it to see how her girlfriend managed to slip out so stealthily in the first place.

As she zips the tent back up again — Blake still sleeping but growing more unusually noisy by the moment — Velvet takes in a deep, bracing breath of chilling night air, letting it wash away the last vestiges of sleepiness as goosebumps flare up along her skin, hair prickling like a spider’s legs… and then she exhales all at once when she notices a scent carried on the breeze, faint enough that had a tingling fear not left her so painfully hyper aware of her surroundings, she might have just missed it entirely. It’s not that of the dew, or the sap of the trees, or the plastic canvas of the tent, but something _darker,_ something that lingers. Velvet sniffs the air once, twice, and then blinks when recognition crashes into her all at once.

“Smoke?” she asks aloud, startled, and a new, tangible fear runs up her spine like a shard of ice. If someone’s started a fire nearby then she _really_ doesn’t want to be anywhere fucking near it, lest emergency services catch them actively trespassing and blame them for any arson or the like — which would be all too easy, given they’re three strange Faunus camping by a burnt-out old fort — and so Velvet’s just about to turn around and wake Blake up, static running right down her fingertips, when a sound from the ruined doorway makes one long ear twitch and turn, drawn away like a lure.

It stops and starts, quiet enough to tickle the edges of Velvet’s perception, and sounds like stones being rearranged or the hollow ceramic clatter of bricks being pulled apart, slow and rhythmic and deliberate, and then silence returns to fill up the space like a rush of water, threatening to wash Velvet towards the source. She waits for it to happen again — and again after that — before she slowly, tentatively, steps closer, armed with torch and camera in hand. If this is Cinder’s idea of a little joke, be it by mucking about in the ruins or exploring alone, Velvet’s going to flip her fucking lid once this night is finally over with.

The problem is, the closer that Velvet gets to the door, the stronger the scent of smoke becomes; no longer is it just a wisp in the air but a full-bodied tang of sulphur and char, and when Velvet swallows thickly, chasing the scent, she’s aware that something else is carried with it, too. There’s a certain fattiness, a meatiness that draws to mind flesh left in the flames to burn and blacken, and Velvet’s so aware of how tired she is, too sluggish to connect the dots as situations flicker through her mind without rhyme nor reason. Had Cinder started a fire? Did other people shelter here, squatting in the strange ruins at the peak of the darkest night? She’s still not sure even as she reaches the doorway, taking in a short, flame-laced breath before she peers inside.

The answer, as it turns out, is somehow both, and also neither.

Just a little ways into the room, Cinder is squatting in the middle of the floor with her back to the door. She’s all hunched over, shoulders pressing up against her ears, and she’s still dressed in the same oversized shirt and underwear she’d worn to go to sleep, her bare feet leaving imprints in the dust that’s thick across the floor. She’s toying with something on the ground — that same hollow grinding sounding out as her shoulders shift — and her focus is so intense that she doesn’t even move as Velvet steps under the doorframe, throwing the light over Cinder’s huddled form… and then nearly leaping free of her own skin when Cinder’s shadow is cast onto the far wall, horns exaggerated to grotesque extremes, all the jagged edges made twice as sharp in a silhouette Velvet remembers from a very different time.

Cinder still doesn’t move.

“Cinder?” Velvet ventures, stepping a little closer, and her girlfriend seems to slow, and then stop, and then she goes still and stiff, as solid and unyielding as a statue. “Baby, what’re you… why are you out here?”

When another step brings her nearly within touching distance, Cinder’s head lifts by a few degrees, and Velvet blinks when her shadow seems to lag half a second behind, like the two aren’t exactly in tune as it tries to play the part of a mimic. Still, Velvet’s so tired, eyes dry with exhaustion, and part of her just chalks it up to that because it’s easier than any weird alternative when all she really wants to do is grab Cinder and leave before the fire catches up to them, too.

Cinder’s head twitches, cants to one side, the shadow doing a poor job of keeping up as it squirms in place. She still doesn’t look to Velvet. “Blake’s having a nightmare, you know. You should go look.”

Her voice is flat in a way that Velvet can’t read, scrubbed of anything that makes Cinder’s voice _Cinder’s,_ and she frowns, glancing behind her before she can help it, ears twisting about to better hear outside. There’s a little shuffle from the tent, a muffled groan — sounding more and more like a struggle the longer she listens — and she hisses under her breath as she turns back around— and this time, she really _does_ jump when Cinder’s shadow has suddenly grown twice as big, swallowing up the torchlight like a black hole, a cavernously empty space that hovers above them like a cloud of ashen smoke, the edges shimmering and warping and writhing in place. The smell of fire is even closer now, potent enough to sear every breath, and it stings right down to where soot settles into Velvet’s lungs.

“Nightmare— what nightmare?” she asks, and there’s a scratchiness to her voice, down her throat, that makes a cough climb up her chest. “Cinder, for fuck’s sake, what are you _doing?”_

“Blake’s having a nightmare,” Cinder repeats, offering no answer, her voice quiet and absent. “Losing hope. Starting to doubt everything we’re doing. You should go look.”

Velvet’s shoes scuffle across the floor, unsure whether to just grab Cinder and haul her out by force or to go and check on Blake, but finally — too slowly, too evenly, too steadily — Cinder turns around, looking over one shoulder to stare at Velvet.

Golden eyes are empty, devoid of soul — there’s no bright and glimmering mirth, no solid and stubborn hardness, no light that bounces back from the mirror of her retinas — and instead it’s like staring down into an open grave, bottomless, darker than even her growing, shifting, shapeless shadow that’s eating the light alive, great and curling horns lengthening by the second into blades that dare to slice into soft and giving skin like a butcher’s cleaver, and as Cinder curls up even smaller her shadow seems to overtake everything around her, no longer confined to the mortal edges of a body, no; it’s crawling free, reaching for Velvet with hands that beg to blind her.

“Smoke kills before the fire does. I told them that,” Cinder murmurs, or maybe she doesn’t, her voice everywhere and nowhere at the same time, whispered right into Velvet’s ear and shouted from a thousand miles away. There’s another scrape of stone, and in Cinder’s hand is grasped a brick that’s been torn right out of the floor, blackened with soot, dripping with blood, sticky with viscera, and maybe none of that at all. “Blake’s having a nightmare, though. You should go look.”

Velvet runs.

Unzipping the tent is so much harder then she’s panicking, hands slippery with sweat and fingers numb with pins and needles that fray tendons and puncture into veins, and when she struggles with her camera and torch she ends up discarding them both, tossing them onto the grass as she wrestles with the zipper, and inside the tent Blake’s starting to groan even louder _— it hurts it hurts it’s so hot in here i can’t breathe —_ and in her mounting panic she’s about to tear the tent open with her bare hands when, from behind, comes a _crack_ like a gunshot, like the crackle of an ember-bright log, and she whips around to hear the rumble of a slow collapse of stone, the splitting of beams, the creation of a burial.

_Cinder. Oh, fuck, the roof’s collapsed._

“Wait there, Blake, baby, I’ll be right back, I’ll—” They’re moaning in their sleep, kicking out, the tent shifting as they twist and turn, and Velvet can feel tears wanting to prick at her eyes — gods, she wants to cry so badly but she just can’t, feeling it all build up and evaporate in an instant — and she grabs the torch, leaves the camera, and runs back towards the fort, slipping across the grass and sprinting into the fort with a shout. “Cinder!”

Cinder’s gone. Despite all the noise, the kitchen’s still intact — though in Cinder’s place has been left the haphazard pile of bricks she’d plucked from the floor, stacked like a cairn beside the hole of damp soil that’s layered beneath — although the doorway into the tower, once half-crushed under debris, is now clear, the rubble shoved aside and split in twain, the dark and heavy beam splintered and cracked as if held in the hands of a giant and snapped like a twig. The footprints of Cinder’s feet pass underneath and deeper into the fort, evenly spaced with her feather-light cadence, but they’re no longer imprinted into the dust across the ground; instead, they sear the stone with _soot,_ as if every step has been ignited underfoot.

Velvet’s first instinct, as fuelled by terror as the rest of her, is to give chase, to drag Cinder out of here by neck and ankle if she must, but her second is to cast the light back over the hole Cinder’s dug into the dark soil. It’s unnerving enough as it is, but when something glimmers back at her, the sweat that drips down Velvet’s back and sticks to her shirt goes cold. There’s something jutting out of the solid earth, pale and fragile, embedded like shards of glass and hurriedly buried, and as Velvet steps closer — nervous, tentative, every joint stiff with an unnatural rigor mortis — her stomach roils at the sight, and something in her brain begs for her to look away as bile climbs up her throat, sourness making her gag. Something isn’t right here, is what every sense tells her, and it makes her dizzy. Something isn’t right here. 

It takes all of Velvet’s strength to turn the torch away, to tear her eyes away from the remains, heat climbing up her ribs, up her throat, settling into her brain like a fog, and she stumbles after Cinder’s trail with gasping breaths. She just needs Cinder. She just needs to grab Cinder and get the fuck out of here.

The spiral staircase up the tower is ancient; stone steps are shiny with wear, bowing under the weight of thousands of footsteps, and more than once Velvet slips in her desperate ascent when an angle is just too harsh, knees bruising, aches running right up her bones. Her nausea heightens the tighter the turn becomes, spiralling around and around and out of control, and in the confines of the stairwell the heat only grows to a sweltering peak, Velvet’s hands so slippery with sweat that holding onto the torch requires a white-knuckled grip. The smoke’s growing heavier, too, stinging at her eyes and making her choke on every torrid breath even as she climbs higher and higher, following Cinder’s ever-darkening trail as handprints scorch the walls, the steps dusty with ash, as the way grows lighter, lighter, lighter, with each and every treacherous step.

Yet, as Velvet rounds the final turn — where the smoke billows at its thickest, the heat boiling the air, and the scent of burnt flesh so pervasive that Velvet can taste it across her tongue, can feel how it leaves grease and fat on her skin — her torch casts no light that can match the brightness in the stairwell, dimming every shadow as if caught under the midday sun. Even the walls are hot to the touch, Velvet flinching every time her palm scrapes against the stone, and as she clambers over the final step and onto the top of the tower, heaving for breath, lungs burnt raw, she gasps, and she stops, and she stares.

Cinder stands at the top of the tower, looking upwards, and the sky above is stained a bright and glowing orange that swirls and churns with clouds of smoke. The heat is unbearable, every inch of Velvet soaked in sweat despite a dry mouth and burning eyes, her tongue sticking strangely in her mouth, too big to fit in the confines of her grit teeth.

And yet, Cinder stands, too immersed to notice. Part of it, made of it, shedding everything weak.

“Cinder,” Velvet croaks out, and she struggles to swallow; all the air in her body has been superheated until she feels like she’s cooking alive from the inside out, every organ baking inside her own skin. “Cinder, please. It’s— it’s over now.”

Velvet steps forwards, reaching out a hand, and there’s a wet _crunch_ from under her shoes that shifts with a gross uncertainty, slippery and congealed. Looking down feels like a mistake, but somehow, she already knows what she’s going to see; a mass of fused and melted bodies stare back up, limbs glued together in a mess of angles, hands reaching up out of the pyre and grasping for a final gasp of air with their marrow reduced to dust, tendons drawn taut, ready to snap with a pluck. Under her foot, the fragile orbit of an eye has shattered, sinking into pools of fat and scorched flesh and clinging to her shoe, leaving it stained yellow and red with gore. 

Atop them all, Cinder is as tall and sure as a stake buried in the earth, waiting for witches to be tied down and set aflame, the temperature pulsing with a heartbeat, eager to reignite. As lithe as the thin of the executioner’s blade, made light and hollow as charcoal, soot-stained fingertips twitch at her sides, and when she turns on one heel — heedless of the flames that lick, the meat that sticks — her eyes are still wide, still empty, heedless of everything but the next piece of kindling to set everything alight once more. From below, Blake’s voice seems to jump another octave, raises to a fever pitch, and Velvet can almost feel it echoed inside her own skull. _please please it’s so hot i can’t breathe i’m scared please help me i don’t wanna die please please please._

“I wish it hadn’t been them.”

Velvet’s ears flick as Cinder glances upwards again, up to where the eye of the storm twists and turns, flickering with firelight that’s long gone out, and her voice sounds too distant for how little space there is between them. A step here, a step there, and Cinder would nearly be in Velvet’s arms again. “Too young for all this revenge, but they had no other choice.”

She stares, and then — for what feels like the first time in a lifetime — her face twists and snarls, and the sharp teeth in her mouth aren’t her own. “Our enemies thought we weren’t strong enough to try,” she whispers, and Velvet chokes on the ash in the air, struggling to draw breath. “They thought that if they took everything we had to live for, we’d just roll over and _die.”_

She steps closer, walking with surety even with bare and blood-wet feet, and she ignores Velvet’s outstretched hand, eyes looking forwards and only at Velvet even as Blake screams for mercy a million miles away.

“They didn’t expect such things like _self-immolation,”_ Cinder murmurs, and when her hand reaches up to cup the soft curve of Velvet’s jaw, smearing soot over her skin, it’s so soft and tender that Velvet leans into the kiss that follows before she even realises it, Cinder’s lips laced with destruction, purring annihilation against her own. “But they don’t realise it doesn’t hurt as much as one might think. After all, smoke kills before the fire does.”

“It’s _over,”_ Velvet whispers back, and her voice crackles like the split of firewood, stored in her chest, smoke climbing up her throat. “Please. Come home.”

Cinder stares. Cinder blinks. Cinder’s eyes turn soft and molten, and she kisses Velvet again.

“I did this for you,” she says. “Everything we did, we did it for you. They all got what they deserved.”

“I know,” Velvet replies, and her voice belongs to someone else. “I know.”

When Velvet takes Cinder’s hand, tugging at her to follow, she does.

The heat doesn’t dissipate as they climb back down the tower, still throbbing with rage as they duck outside of the fort together, the smoke so dense that Velvet struggles to find the tent even as Cinder takes the lead, walking as straight and unerred as if it were a clear summer’s day. The sky is dawn-bright, the world cast in a dusty, ember-speckled orange, and Cinder’s palm is hot against Velvet’s, fiery as a brand.

When Cinder reaches the tent, it seems to fall open with the lightest touch, and inside Blake is still thrashing in their sleep, kicking against their sleeping bag and soaked in sweat as they cry out. But Cinder just coos, crawling inside to curl up by their side.

“Shh,” she murmurs, and when she touches their sweat-lined forehead, they settle under her touch in an instant, breathing quick, shallow breaths. “Shh, they’re gone now. I know it hurts, I know, but they’re gone now. I love you.”

With the smallest, weakest moan, Blake turns slack, falling back against their pillow. There’s no breath from them now, too still and too silent, but Cinder settles back on her sleeping bag without a care, eyes bright as candlelight as she looks up to Velvet. The soles of her feet are still dark and burnt, and she smells of phosphorus and sulphate, of a newly-struck match, settled deep into her skin.

“Sleep,” she says, beckoning Velvet to lay beside her, reaching up to take her hand once more. “It’s over now. You can rest.”

Exhaustion is grabbing at Velvet’s legs like an anchor’s weight, and she doesn’t protest even as Cinder coaxes her into place, arms snaking about her neck and her long ears tucked beneath her chin. Everything feels too heavy, now, too heavy to fight against, and when Cinder’s hand presses over her eyes to plunge her into darkness, it’s easy, so easy, to sink into.

“Sleep.”

The heat builds, the crackle and roar of the inferno reaching ever closer, and as Velvet’s breaths grow shorter and shorter, all the oxygen slipping away from her, she finally — finally — sleeps.

* * *

“—yeah, no, I mean. It wasn’t really a _nightmare_ , I just… I think I overheated in the sleeping bag ‘cause I didn’t take my hoodie off, so I was, uh, steaming alive in my own sweat, which is gross. So, yeah. Bad night.”

“My night was alright, really. Though, I went out to pee at, like, three in the morning or something like that, and it was _terrifying_ being out there alone in the pitch black. All I could see was the shape of the tower, like, _looming_ over me—”

_[shuffling]_

“Oh, there is she. Velvet, you slept like a stone last night, me and Blake were having a heck of a time—”

“What the _fuck_ were you playing at last night? What _was_ that?”

“What?”

“What? I… slept? Like everyone did?”

“You— no, you didn’t. You _didn’t._ You went in the fort on your _own_ in the middle of the fucking _night—”_

“Velv—”

“—and I had to go in there and convince you to come back to bed!”

“Uh, no? I didn’t? Do I look crazy enough to go in there alone in the dark?”

“Then why did I find you in there at— who fuckin’ knows what hour? You were— I smelled smoke and you were sat in there and you said—”

“Smoke?”

“Well, I… well, yeah, I smelled smoke yesterday, but I didn’t—”

“Wait, what smoke? What are you two talking about?”

“I saw you! Don’t— don’t lie to me, okay, I _saw_ you. You were in the— in the fucking _fort_ and you said that… you… I…”

“Baby. Baby, look at me. I didn’t— I swear to you, at no point during the entire night was I ever in that fort alone.”

“You… no, you _were,_ you told me… you told me something and I don’t _remember…”_

“Velv, Cinder was only up to pee and help me squirm outta my sleeping bag when I got too hot. Nobody went into the fort, and I didn’t smell smoke or anything like that.”

“I… you must have, it was… it was _everywhere,_ and… and you were having a nightmare and— Blake, I remember, you were—”

“I didn’t— no, baby, I didn’t have a nightmare. I just got too hot and wriggly, but I slept fine all night, yeah?”

“No… no! You _were._ You said you couldn’t breathe and you were shouting and I couldn’t help you—”

“Fuck me, baby, no. I’m fine, see?”

“I— I—”

“Velvet, look at me. _Look_ at me. Blake was fine all night, and I was asleep right next to you, okay? You’ve had a horrible nightmare. That’s it.”

“Yeah, like, when I woke up, Cinder was right across your chest at one point. Thought she was gonna suffocate you to death, honestly.”

“Hey, I— look, I see nice titties, I put my face on ‘em.”

“I just… I could have _sworn…”_

“The camera rolled all night, you can look for yourself if you wanna. I mean, it’s still rolling now ‘cause we were gonna do a, uh, _bit_ or whatever, but—”

“You… I’m just… I saw you. It was hot and I couldn't breathe and you said… gods, what _was_ it you said…”

“Oh, baby, you had a nightmare, yeah? We just got so pumped about this whole thing that you had a crazy dream about it. There’s no smoke, no shouting, no nothing. Just us and a bunch of rubble.”

“...”

“Hey, lemme turn off the camera for a sec, yeah? Hang on—”

* * *

The tents are packed up, Blake groaning as they lift the bulk of the weight onto their back, and Cinder is taking one last good look around the place before they leave for home. It’s a rain-drizzled, foggy morning, the trees misted into a washed-out grey and the woods left damp and fizzling, sunlight dispersed into a yellow glow across the sky like a smudge of paint. There’s a cleanliness to the air, the freshness of a new dawn, and when Cinder takes in a breath that reaches the very bottom of her lungs it makes her cough, a new tightness to her chest pressing up against her ribs. She really needs to get out more.

All things considered, however, the night had been about as boring as anticipated — a short excursion to the treeline to piss (which had been unreasonably scary and, as such, was not something she was planning on doing again soon) and a few hazy, nonsensical dreams aside, Blake had woken up wet with sweat but far less tense than the day before, all loose shouldered and smiling wider, and they’d slipped outside together to watch the sunrise with camera in hand.

And then Velvet had woken up rambling and wide-eyed and _angry,_ staring Cinder down with a wildness to her body that made her jump and jitter, arguing that she’d only gone wandering into the fort alone (which she’d never) and that Blake had been shouting and screaming in their sleep (Cinder can attest this didn’t happen), and that there had been smoke and fire and shadows that chased her every step, trying to claw Cinder back with a desperate grasp. Even after they reviewed the footage from the night to prove that everything Blake and Cinder said was true, Velvet was still on edge, tension making every muscle jut sharply as she looked at Cinder like she was staring at someone entirely new, sweeping Blake’s hair out of their face and murmuring softly to them like she wasn’t entirely sure they were real.

But they have proof that nothing happened and she’s willing to accept that, at least, even if she keeps staring at the remains of the tower like she’s looking for some final puzzle piece, something that will make make last night click together, and so Cinder lets her be until the very last second they need to leave, Blake threatening to take off without them as they edge ever closer to the treeline. So, she walks up to Velvet, following her eyeline inside the darkened doorway of the fort as if there’s something sat inside, waiting, capturing Velvet’s attention so intensely.

But there isn’t, of course. Nothing but dust and stone and brick.

“C’mon,” she murmurs, pressing a kiss to one rounded shoulder, feeling the warmth of her body under the thin cotton of her shirt. “Let’s go home and have a proper sleep, yeah? We can get some breakfast on the way, if you like.”

Velvet swallows, inhaling sharply through her nose, and Cinder thinks of the slightest hint of smoke she’d caught in the air yesterday, thinks of Blake’s confusion, real and surprised _(what smoke? what are you two talking about?)_. It’s haunting the grounds like some sort of specter, flitting in and out of reality. Maybe, in some way, it’s evidence enough that something does still linger here — something angry, something buried, something waiting to be ignited into a new blaze. Cinder doesn’t plan on staying here long enough to get better acquainted. 

“Okay,” Velvet exhales, and her shoulders slump. “Okay.” She blinks, looks down to Cinder, and her half-smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes before she steps back to head over towards where Blake waits on the path back towards the fence, arms crossed over their chest and foot tapping impatiently.

Cinder’s about to follow after her when, out of the corner of her eye, a chance flicker of light across the floor draws her eye back, frowning as she looks inside the doorway. She’s not sure what Velvet had been staring at so intently, not exactly, but there’s a prickle of awareness — of _familiarity —_ that runs along the back of her neck and gives her a clue as she stares at a pile of displaced bricks, a pit left in the floor where someone’s pulled them free, all the ancient mortar crumbling to dust. They’re near the far wall, easy to overlook and go amiss under wandering eyes, but Cinder’s so _sure_ they hadn’t been there yesterday — so sure she’d not spotted anything of the like during their trips into the fort — that she steps closer, crossing the threshold to peer at the bricks, at the dark soil left exposed underneath. It’s been recently disturbed, clawed at and reburied, but there’s something underneath, pale and jutting free and fragile enough to shatter at a touch, and it registers in the back of Cinder’s mind as something she’s seen before. Not seen— _touched,_ _done._ It’s like seeing it in a memory, or maybe some kind of dream, and she’s about to step closer to unearth it, to dig her fingers deep and pull—

“Cinder? _Cinder!”_

Flinching, Cinder curses and turns around, Velvet’s voice lilting up in a frantic pitch in a way that tells her she’s ill-advised to stay where she is, and she brushes off her trousers before marching back outside, waving her arms for Velvet to see she’s fine. “Sorry! Sorry, I just saw a… a _huge_ spider in there—”

In her distraction, she doesn’t notice the way her boots had lined up with faded footprints in the dust, the way they matched in size and in the lilt of her stride, and she won’t notice — not until she’s been at home for hours, stroking her fingers through Velvet’s long hair — how that same dark soil is caught in the whorls of her fingerprints, trapped under black-painted nails.

She does notice, however, the way that her palms tingle with a certain recognition, itching the whole way home, and how she can almost feel the edges of the misplaced bricks in her palm of her hand like an echo.

* * *

“So, after we got home and I was slightly less, like, _completely_ nuts, I decided to do a little more research into this fort and the, uh, fire, to see if there were any other theories as to what happened there. And, as it turns out, it might actually be that all of our theories so far have a little bit of truth in our final, mega, fifth theory.”

“Ooh. Enlighten us, babe.”

“Aliens.”

“It’s— no, not aliens. It’s actually, like… okay, I think you might actually get a kick out of this, ready?”

“Okay, hit me with it.”

“Our fifth theory is more to do with a certain sect of Faunus who were — back in the tribelands era — better known as the elite guards who protected the Chieftain of Jarro, and these guys were basically the _original_ White Fang.”

“Oh, yeah! I remember you telling me about them ages ago.”

“Really? Is that where the Fang of today got their name?”

“Yeah, like… it’s not the same organisation or, like, _thing_ it was back then, but they’re basically keeping up the, uh, idea of it? Protecting the Faunus of the world and our customs, and so on. Anyway, after the war was lost way back when, the surviving members of the White Fang and their descendants made this _pact_ to, um, take revenge on all the major, like, human figures of the war and all the things they’d built, right? So, assassinating these people and kidnapping ‘em, or blowing up their homes or, uh, setting it alight—”

“So the arson theory was the closest, basically?”

“No. Well. Yes? _Kind of._ The thing is, Fort Spearhead wasn’t just a watchtower or boundary thing; it was also being used as a sort of temporary holding cell throughout the 600s for Faunus who got arrested outside of the city. They’d get held there for a few days, and then got taken into the city proper for basically a, uh, kangaroo court and trial, which usually ended in them being summarily executed over literally nothing, as you do.”

“Oof.”

“That’s shitty, but how does that all tie together?”

“Well, as these Fang remnants started aiming for, like, larger and larger targets to take out, a lot of these Faunus didn’t— they _knew_ they wouldn’t survive the encounters either way, right? Like, either they died in the attack, or got executed after the fact. So, uh… well, they just started treating themselves like… tinder.”

“... I’m not sure if I’m a _huge_ fan of where this is going.”

 _“Tinder_ is a very interesting word choice there, babe.”

“I mean, it should be, ‘cause the method some of the Fang adopted to make their final statements was, uh… self-immolation.”

“Oh, gods.”

“Wait… that’s why—”

“This is still all _theory,_ mind you, and not proven either way, but… it’s believed that these Faunus _let_ themselves get arrested and taken to Fort Spearhead, this last big symbol of human victory in the war…”

“To set themselves on fucking fire.”

“Arson through immolation. Die to take the whole thing out.”

“So, yeah. Arson. A suicide mission to end the final symbol of human invasion.”

“Fuck me. Explains why the vibes there were so gnarly.”

“Yeah, and like… that’s why I said that, uh, in a way, the theories actually all combine? Well, maybe not the Mantle one, but the others… ‘cause when you think about it, it’s probably not so crazy to say that the Hallows — or the _idea_ of the Hallows — was what drove ‘em to do it, right?”

“And that fort isn’t too far from my home, really.”

“Yeah! Which is a church to _Dacite,_ the Hallow of war and resurrection!”

“And even if the church wasn’t necessarily there there when this happened—”

“—to die to end a symbol of human dominance over the tribes is what Hallows like Dacite must have believed in. Of _course_ some monument to those ideals would have followed.” 

“Wow. _Wow._ I feel like we really cracked this one right open. Cracked that little egg right over the pan.”

“And all it took was you losing your _marbles_ for, like, a night—”

“Shut up! Shut up, okay, shh—”

“...”

“Thoughts, Cinder?”

“I just… well, I just thought that… maybe we could explain that, too.”

“Hm?”

“Well, ghosts— or spirits, or whatever… we joked that they might leave us alone because we’re Faunus too, right? But maybe _because_ we’re Faunus, they… they wanted to, like, show us the truth? Or their memories?”

“Like… of the Faunus who were there?”

“Yeah. I mean, maybe.”

“Huh. That’s, uh. A wild idea.”

“Yeah, like— I dunno. Maybe this is too weird even for this video.”

“A little bit.”

“I don’t know. I just… since Velvet reacted so badly, and since your family are so like… _connected…”_

“No, no, I like… I see exactly what you mean. Unfortunately, that just means all the evidence we think we saw or felt or _smelt_ or whatever was in forms the camera couldn’t pick up, so we’re still pretty in the dark about it, huh?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Alas.”

“Guess that wraps it up here, then. Let’s never do it again.”

“Mood. Well, uh, thanks for watching, everyone! Next time, we’ll try to find an even _cooler_ spot to explore and, uh, hopefully I won’t go as completely _crazy_ as I did this time!”

“And maybe we’ll actually get real evidence.”

“If we’re lucky, right? Anyway, as ever: I’m Velvet, that’s Blake, this is Cinder, and we’ll see y’all next time on _getting a girlfriend the ghost hunter way!”_

“We are still not calling it that—”

“Bye everyone!”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you wanna see more content from moi, follow me on [faunusrights](faunusrights.tumblr.com), and remember to leave some kudos and a comment if you enjoyed! See y'all around!


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